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Abstract

It is appealing to consider hybrids of neural-network learning algorithms with evolutionary search procedures, simply because Nature has so successfully done so. In fact, computational models of learning and evolution offer theoretical biology new tools for addressing questions about Nature that have dogged that field since Darwin [Belew, 1990]. The concern of this paper, however, is strictly artificial: Can hybrids of connectionist learning algorithms and genetic algorithms produce more efficient and effective algorithms than either technique applied in isolation? The paper begins with a survey of recent work (by us and others) that combines Holland's Genetic Algorithm (GA) with connectionist techniques and delineates some of the basic design problems these hybrids share. This analysis suggests the dangers of overly literal representations of the network on the genome (e.g., encoding each weight explicitly). A preliminary set of experiments that use the GA to find unusual but successf...